Our Message is Wrong

More SaaS thoughts:

We can't expect to communicate with peers about what we do saying things like, "We are on-demand CRM for small businesses". We will get responses like "Oh, that's a tough space" as well as the cheeky looks, as if there were some memo that we missed years ago about how horrible the CRM space is. Also, our geographic location is sketchy. We got a few comments like, "You are a SaaS vendor from Gilbert, AZ??", as if we moved some bales of hay aside from the barn and plugged our servers in...

The "CRM" buzzword is nice for communicating to potential clients because we can leverage SalesForce.com's investment in the buzzword, but it just doesn't work for industry. We are no more a CRM provider than an 18-wheeler or Ferrari is an "automobile".

So, what are we, then? Really, it comes down to our value proposition. We don't get any testimonials from people saying: "Wow, I am so excited about the way I could save the task to my lead record and then come back later and view it!". The reviews we are getting tout the automation - the fact that they can come into the morning, sit at their desk and do nothing but watch the orchestration of 300 completely unique multi-step communication sequences across tens of thousands of leads. That's power. And I don't even think it's the tip of the iceberg of what we can do.

Template Email Guy

I heard a guy at the conference lamenting that he couldn't send an automated email from SalesForce to a client when the client signed up. These are the steps he had to follow (he recounted them to the guy he was talking to):
1. Log into SalesForce
2. Click the Opportunity tab
3. Search for the record
4. When the record was pulled up, click the "Email" button
5. Locate your template
6. Click "Send"

He said something along the lines that "it's automated in the sense that we are using a template, but it doesn't automatically go out".

Are you kidding me?? A template email is NOT automation - but people are so starved for it that they are grasping on to every morsel they can get from their current vendor.

So, you can probably guess how many of the sessions dealt with automation, or with really putting systems to work for business: Zero. Other than Template Email Guy, nobody made a peep.

But I did hear a lot of talk from SalesForce about how many kazillions of transactions they are doing per minute (a transaction is roughly the equivalent of a hit to them) . And I think they're missing the boat altogether. How about this for a measurement of your system's success: A client's ratio of transactions(hits) to actual sales.? See, I would bet 10,000 shares of SalesForce stock that our clients spend ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less time in our software to generate the same number of sales. Let's put it this way - I'd like to see a guy selling bird tricks online bringing in over $1,000,000/year using SalesForce.com.

You don't want your clients using your software, you want them making sales. (ooh, sales, not software????)

So, I don't know how to capture this into a nice tag line or acronym, but I'm convinced we need to.